On the Improvement of Multiple Circles Detection from Images Using Hough Transform

Abstract

The automatic detection of lines and curves from color images is a very important task in many applications, such as object recognition and scene reconstruction. Although there are closed formulation for curve fitting to a set of points, if the point set describes more than one instance of the object, as two circles for example, there is no closed formulation for obtaining the individual set of parameters without a priori information of which points belong to each object. However, it is usual the presence of multiple instances of objects such as lines and circles on an image. The well known Hough Transform is an efficient tool for recovering multiple objects from images using a voting process where the usual presence of false positives is an issue. In our work, we present an improvement on the voting process to detect multiple circles using Hough Transform in order to avoid false positives. Our experiments show that our voting process leads to a more robust detection, reducing the number of false positive and providing a more accurate detection even with large number of circles.